We prayed
for many years that God would heal a terminally ill friend. He continued to
deteriorate despite our prayers. The doctors, finally, gave up hope. Then a few friends requested a
famous faith-healer, who happened to be in the city, to visit and pray for our ailing
friend. The preacher visited and prayed. Lo and behold, the terminally ill man was
miraculously healed!
Did God
change HIS mind when a more righteous or a spiritually gifted faith-healer
prayed for this ailing person?
Can God
change HIS mind?
There are
two diametrically opposite answers to this question. Some Christians believe that
God can change HIS mind, whereas others assert that God does not and cannot
change HIS mind.
Let us
briefly study their assertions.
God Changes HIS Mind
Some
Christians think that God can change HIS mind, “…advocates of a theory called
open theism have argued that God can and does change and that we can cause that
change. They find their support for this in passages such as Genesis 18, where
Abraham intercedes before the Lord for Sodom and Gomorrah, and God seemingly
changes His mind. They claim further support from passages like Jeremiah
18:7–10, Jonah 3:10, and Genesis 6:6, which speak of God repenting or relenting
or being sorry.”1
These Christians,
upon reading these verses, believe that God changes HIS mind:
“The Lord regretted that he had made human
beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled.” (Genesis 6:6, NIV,
Emphasis Mine).
“And the Lord repented of the evil which he
thought to do to his people.” (Exodus 32:14, RSV, Emphasis Mine).
“If at any
time I announce that a nation or kingdom is to be uprooted, torn down and
destroyed, and if that nation I warned repents of its evil, then I will relent and not inflict on it the
disaster I had planned. And if at another time I announce that a nation or
kingdom is to be built up and planted, and if it does evil in my sight and does
not obey me, then I will reconsider the
good I had intended to do for it." (Jeremiah 18: 7-10, NIV, Emphasis Mine).
“When God
saw what they did and how they turned from their evil ways, he relented and did not bring on them
the destruction he had threatened.” (Jonah 3:10, NIV, Emphasis Mine).
God Cannot Change HIS
Mind
Pastor,
theologian, and author, R.C Sproul, unpacks this dilemma from the vantage
point of God’s omniscience.2
There’s one sense in which it
seems God is changing his mind, and there’s another sense in which the Bible
says God never changes his mind because God is omniscient. He knows all things
from the beginning, and he is immutable. He is unchanging. There’s no shadow of
turning within him. For example, He knows what Moses is going to say to him in
Numbers 14 before Moses even opens his mouth to plead for the people. Then
after Moses has actually said it, does God suddenly changes his mind? He
doesn’t have any more information than he had a moment before. Nothing has
changed as far as God’s knowledge or his appraisal of the situation.
Is God confused, stumbling
through all the different options—Should I do this? Should I not do that? And
does he decide upon one course of action and then think, Well, maybe that’s not
such a good idea after all, and change his mind? Obviously God is omniscient;
God is all wise. God is eternal in his perspective and in his full knowledge of
everything. So we don’t change God’s mind. But prayer changes things. It
changes us. And there are times in which God waits for us to ask for things
because his plan is that we work with him in the glorious process of bringing
his will to pass here on earth.
Similarly, Dr.
William Lane Craig explains this theme from the perspective of God’s
foreknowledge and the need for us to understand the literary genre’s of the
Bible and the literary devices used by the biblical authors for an effective
narration. If we understand these details, we will be able to accurately
interpret the Bible. Thus we would possess a proper understanding of God.
Here’s William Lane Craig:3
I don’t think that God can change
his mind, because as an omniscient being, he knows everything that will happen,
including his own decisions. God has foreknowledge not only of everything that
creatures will do, but also knowledge of his own acts…If God knows the truth
value of all true future tense propositions — then he will know the truth value
of propositions about his own actions — like God will part the Red Sea; he
knows that. So, God would have knowledge of everything in the future, and
therefore there could be no basis for changing his mind. An omniscient being
cannot change his mind, it would only be an ignorant being, a being that is
ignorant, that could acquire some new reason for doing something that would
cause him to change his mind…
There are some Scriptures which,
at least superficially to a layperson, looks like God’s changing his mind.
Jonah and the whale and Nineveh where God was going to destroy the city unless
something happened, and he seemed to change his mind.
It’s vital that we understand
the literary genre, or type, of most of these biblical stories. The Bible is in
the form of narratives. They’re stories about God told from the human point of
view. And so, a good storyteller will tell his story with all the vivacity and
color that he wants to enhance his narrative.
And so, you’ll find stories in
the Bible about God, told from a human perspective where God not only lacks
knowledge of the future, but even lacks knowledge of what’s going on presently.
God comes down to Abraham and says, “I’ve heard the outcry in Sodom and
Gomorrah. I’m going to go see if what I’ve heard is really happening there.”
Well, that would deny not only
God’s foreknowledge, but his knowledge of the present. And there are other
passages where God is spoken of in anthropomorphic terms of having nostrils and
eyes and arms and other sort of bodily parts—wings. If you take all of these
literally, God would be a sort of fire-breathing monster.
And so, these are
anthropomorphisms. They are literary devices that are part of the storyteller’s
art, and shouldn’t be read like a philosophy of religion or systematic theology
textbook. There’s just a naïve view of the type of literature that Scripture
is.
Need For Proper Interpretation
Of The Bible
Unless we
understand the Bible as how God – the author of the Bible – desires us to
understand, we will subscribe to a faulty theological position, which, at
times, could be detrimental to our salvation. Hence it is imperative to
interpret the Bible accurately, “…while the above texts talk of God as
changing, there are numerous texts in the Old and New Testaments that tell us
that God does not change in His being (Psalm 102:25–27; c.f. Hebrews 1:10–12;
Malachi 3:6; James. 1:17) and that He does not change His mind (Numbers 23:19;
Hebrews 6:17–18). This is not to play different texts against each other but to
know that we need some interpretive principles to help us understand the Bible.
There are two reasonable interpretive principles that can help us understand
these passages:
1.
Difficult passages should be interpreted in light of other clearer passages.
2. Passages
which are found in the historical narrative in Scripture should be interpreted
in light of the didactic (instruction/teaching) passages (such as the
epistles.).”4
Can My Prayer Change
God’s Mind?
If our
prayer can change God’s mind, then there would exist an overabundance of
confusions and contradictions that would effectively destroy our spirituality. If
our prayer can change God’s mind, then God cannot be a maximally great being,
but let’s not even go to such stupendous theological dilemmas.
Consider
this rather simplified dilemma. If I pray for rain and if you pray for no rain
(because your home is in a low lying flood prone location), and if God answers
my prayer and not yours, then would you not consider God to be partial and cruel?
Numerous theological complications, such as this, could be offered, but there is
no need, for God does not change HIS mind, “…people often ask whether prayer
can change God’s mind….How could a prayer change God’s mind?.... Is it that
when Abraham (Genesis 18:16–33) came to God, he came to Him with information
that God lacked apart from what Abraham told Him? Obviously Abraham didn’t
teach God something that He didn’t already know. In fact, God knew that Sodom
would have fewer than ten righteous people, whereas Abraham did not. God’s mind
doesn’t change because it doesn’t need to change. He knows everything, and He knows
the end from the beginning. God has no plan B because there are no deficiencies
or flaws in His plan A.
Does prayer
change things? Yes. Does God use prayer as a secondary means to bring His work
to pass? Yes. Does God not only invite us to pray but command us to? Yes. Does
the effective prayer of righteous man accomplish much? Yes. But do these things
change God’s mind? No. Why? Because God has never had to change His mind from
the foundation of the world (Ephesians 1:11).”5
Endnotes:
1https://answersingenesis.org/who-is-god/does-god-change-his-mind/
2http://www.ligonier.org/blog/does-god-change-his-mind/
3http://www.reasonablefaith.org/media/can-god-change-robert-lawrence-kuhn
4https://answersingenesis.org/who-is-god/does-god-change-his-mind/
5Ibid.
Websites cited were last accessed on 16th October
2017.
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